100 Years Of Mies: His Ideas Still Shape The Way Architects Think

January 26, 1986|By Paul Gapp, Architecture critic.

In this centennial year of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe`s birth, dozens of lecturers, exhibits and publications will interpret, memorialize and celebrate the work of the 20th Century`s most influential architect. But what can the majority of us extract from such a deluge of commentary?

The timing of all this retrospection is obviously arbitrary, since there is nothing magical about the passage of a century since the birth of Mies in Aachen, Germany, on March 27, 1886.

Yet it is coincidentally appropriate timing. Mies has been dead for 17 years, and that gives us enough distance from which to view the strengths and weaknesses of his work more dispassionately than before. It allows everyone to see more clearly what Mies did to architecture, how his influence persists and how his buildings finally generated a rebellion that is today changing the look of our cities.

In offering a few thoughts on these subjects, it is necesssary to reflect momentarily on Mies` European roots. Mies did not found the Bauhaus school in Germany, of course. Walter Gropius did. Yet Mies was more popularly identified with the Bauhaus than anyone, and his impact on the skylines of America was far greater.

Gropius immigrated from Germany to teach architecture at Harvard and form a practice with a number of young partners. But Mies became a much more prolific designer after settling in Chicago, and many students he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) attained national prominence as followers of the Miesian way.

Among the latter were the brilliant Myron Goldsmith and Jacques Brownson. Goldsmith went on to the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM)

while Brownson joined C.F. Murphy & Associates, another large Chicago firm.

Mies` IIT alumni turned out clean-lined, finely detailed and muscular buildings. By the 1960s, Chicago`s collection of works by SOM and Murphy included such showpieces as the Inland Steel, Equitable, Daley Civic Center, Hartford and CNA Center buildings.

As America`s largest architectural firm, SOM played the single most powerful role in spreading Miesianism and making it de rigueur among classy corporate clients. Before long, scarcely a major city in the nation did not have at least one tall building designed by architects in one of SOM`s nine offices.

Mies himself, meanwhile, was turning out some 30 Chicago buildings--far more than in any other city. His most famous Chicago towers are the 860-880 N. Lake Shore Dr. apartments. Mies` best-regarded Chicago low-rise is Crown Hall at IIT, where he designed 20 structures and created a campus master plan.

It is worth pausing at this point to examine the ironical and in some respects conflicting relationships that Mies had with New York`s architectural establishment--particularly Philip Johnson.

Manhattan had been getting rather consistently dreary post-World War II architecture when in 1952 Gordon Bunshaft of SOM in New York designed Lever House, a glassy slab that proved the Miesian manner could be applied to office buildings.

Not long after Bunschaft`s triumph, New York got a building by Mies himself quite by chance, and that is a tale that deserves recollection.

When the Joseph E. Seagram and Sons Corp. approached the 100th anniversary of its founding in 1858, president Samuel Bronfman decided to celebrate the centennial by constructing an office building on Park Avenue.

Bronfman wanted to make the building something special, and in pursuit of that goal he commissioned the California design firm of Luckman & Pereira.

But Bronfman`s daughter, Phyllis Lambert, decided that what the company really needed was Rolls Royce architecture, and prevailed on her father to hold out for the best. Lambert called on New York architect Philip Johnson to help conduct a talent hunt, and Mies eventually got the job.

As construction of the Seagram Building began, however, Mies was in effect kicked off the job by officials who complained that he had no license to practice architecture in the state of New York and would have to at least prove that he possessed the equivalent of a high school education.

Smoldering with rage, Mies went back to Chicago. Things were eventually made right by the licensing officials, and ever since then members of New York`s architecture establishment have been bragging that the Seagram is Mies` best office building (it was also his first). That judgment is surely correct, but sidesteps the fact that Mies never designed another building of any kind in Manhattan.

Completion of the Seagram tower also pretty well marked the end of Mies`

friendship with Philip Johnson, who was long Mies` biggest booster and prime New York connection before turning his back on Miesian dogma.

Johnson was director of the architecture department at New York`s Museum of Modern Art in 1932 when MOMA mounted an exhibition called ``The